[Update: 10:00pm] The talk went well, but was quite poorly attended. The ratio of hours I spent preparing to aggregate hours the audience spent listening (number of listeners * length of talk) was no better than 1:1. Perhaps, if I had called it: “A Second Spanish Armada: Neo-Colonialist Pillage in West Africa,” more people would have attended.

That said, having two people I knew in the audience – my friend Bilyana and my college advisor Robert Shilliam – made it seem more worthwhile. Also, it is always good to have a change to practice public speaking. I am getting better, but I still find that I get entirely lost within the act of speaking and lose a good sense of how I look from the outside.